Fermi’s Fate: A Game of Existential Gambits

Fermi’s Fate: A Game of Existential Gambits

By Mia Simmons, Aidan Jones, Audrey Scott, and Daniela Chen

We created a board game called “Fermi’s Fate: A Game of Existential Gambits” that contextualizes the existential risks covered in class, educating players and illustrating the compounding nature of potential threats. Our goal for this game is to prompt dialogue about a multitude of existential risks from each class session and illustrate how conflicting perspectives and vested interests come into play when managing disasters. The game box, board, logos, characters, and cards were all made and designed by hand. Participants play as faction leaders (i.e., the politician, the technocrat, the spiritualist), who each have their own values and priorities as predefined in their faction description. They progress across the game board via dice rolls. The game’s objective is to collect “resource tokens” and reach the end of the board with enough acquired tokens to send their faction to another planet and/or engage with alien life, hence the name Fermi’s Fate. Each faction leader will strive to acquire a different combination of resource tokens. For instance, the technocrat may desire more general technology tokens, while the spiritualist may desire more social harmony tokens to amass a following. All players will need to acquire progress tokens to achieve space travel.

Over the course of the game, players have the opportunity to answer trivia questions when they land on a blue space, which will allow them to win resource tokens if answered correctly and require them to move back two spaces if they answer incorrectly. There are also red disaster event spaces (e.g., global pandemic, natural disaster, misinformation campaign, etc.) that necessitate faction leaders to play the required resource tokens in order to circumvent the disaster; for example, a global pandemic may require a general technology token and a social harmony token in order for society to produce a vaccine quickly and get citizens to take it. If a player does not possess the required tokens or chooses not to sacrifice them, all players will face a token loss punishment of some kind. It is up to the players whether they would want to compete or collaborate in these situations. A yellow space gives players a resource token of their choice to make up for the fact that they will be losing them rapidly on disaster cards. When a player reaches the end of the board, if they meet their resource token requirements, they have the opportunity to roll the dice for a chance to undertake space travel. However, if they do not roll effectively, they must go back 10 spaces and experience more existential threats before they have the chance to try again. This drives home the uncertainty present in existential risk and the compounding nature of disasters.

All cards – trivia and disaster – serve an educational goal in addition to gameplay. The disaster cards add risk and cast doubt on the likelihood of game completion, but also aim to be realistic scenarios that players can think about in the context of their own lives. For example, our two most “deadly” cards are the Climate Change and Nuclear War disaster cards. To emphasize the innate uncertainty in risk as discussed in class, each of these intensive doomsday events must be avoided not with resource token payout but instead with a dice roll akin to a “saving throw” in tabletop role-playing games. The failure penalty for the Climate Change card is that all other climate disasters carry double the resource sacrifice, while the failure penalty for the Nuclear War card is total game failure. For climate, this emphasizes the slow-roll of compounding effects of growing climate disasters, and for nuclear, this emphasizes the totality of destruction and the near disaster avoidances we have experienced in the past. Trivia Cards contain questions about topics we have covered in class, rewarding players for correct answers and mildly punishing them for guessing incorrectly. The average layperson will not know the answers to several questions; rather, through playing the game and participating in trivia, a player will learn about existential risks and attempts to mitigate them. Questions are spread across all of the risk modules we have covered this quarter. For instance, nuclear questions may include information on the number of nations that possess nuclear weapon arsenals or percentage uranium import share for Russian weapons manufacturers. By drawing from readings, discussions, and lectures, we created gameplay that provides a doorway to existential threat studies.

All of these compounding risks and disasters are built upon the framework of Fermi’s Paradox, our inspiration for the game. According to “Where is Everybody? An Account on Fermi’s Question,” Eric M. Jones details the accounts of Edward Teller and others of a Los Alamos conversation. During which Fermi wondered: if there may be a certain chance of advanced alien civilizations, where would said aliens be since we have no evidence for their existence? Fermi explored several explanations as to why we have not been visited by alien life, one being that perhaps a “technological civilization does not last long enough for it to happen” (Jones, 3). This evolved into a solution known as the Great Filter, coined by controversial social scientist Robert Hanson in 1998. The solution posits that, along the path from the emergence of life on a planet to its cosmically widespread reach and visibility, a step is highly improbable. Though some believe that abiogenesis is improbable, others wonder if the Great Filter preventing cosmic expansion is catastrophe on the way to its realization. The latter proposition is particularly salient given the time period of Fermi’s initial conversation (i.e., being at Los Alamos in 1950 when development for the hydrogen bomb was underway). Humanity has faced and will continue to face numerous existential challenges before expanding into the stars, if we ever make it past these Great Filters at all. Centuries ago, a plague killed half of the world’s population before we ever thought of germ theory. More recently, the atomic and hydrogen bombs were developed and total nuclear war averted before humankind had sent a craft into interstellar space. It is not unreasonable, then, to assume that if the bomb came before space travel, a civilization may wipe itself out of cosmic contention. This idea is explored further in the Nuclear War disaster card coming into effect once a certain progress token count is met, displaying how the two are inextricably linked – progress comes with risk. Now, in new eras of existential threats, these Filters may be shaped by not only nuclear development or once-a-century plagues, but also by artificial intelligence and climate change, which are further complicated by issues of disinformation and societal inequity. In our game’s exploration of Fermi’s Paradox, we focus on recent histories and futures of existential peril. Players experience the Great Filter of our transition from technology development in our planet’s history to actually realizing interstellar travel in search of new peoples. It is up to players’ wits and chance to see if they make it through the series of existential gambits.

Jones, E.M. (1985). Where is everybody? An account of Fermi’s Question. United States, https://doi.org/10.2172/5746675.